Saturday night STREET TimeSpeedDistance rally on 4/29 starting in Mount Kisco NY. Should be a 2 to 4 hour rally from 40 to 120 miles. Registration between 5pm and 6:15pm, drivers meeting at 6:30pm, first car out at 7pm (leaving in car number order). Any street legal car with no lights higher than headlights. Trophys to top scorers and for special classes (all ladies class, husband/wife team, more than 2 people in car aka family class, etc). Cars with rally computers or navi systems (GPS or otherwise) not eligable for trophys.

What you need: TWO people in each car (driver and navigator) more than 2 will be forced to run in family class, pen and clipboard or something similar to write on laps, some kind of lap lighting for navigator that wont blind the driver, a FULL tank of gas before drivers meeting (you may run out on some backroad in the middle of nowhere)

WSCC rallys can be very competitive if you're trying for a perfect score/trophy down to a fun night of driving with your spouse/child/whatever. I see cars from rallied out Subarus with huge lighting to mom & dad with two kids in the back in a minivan. You DONT need a special car for a street rally. The rally is how YOU drive it. Score is based on perfect time (too early or too late to checkpoint=bad points) and hidden signs on the side of the road (missing a sign on your score sheet=bad points) so technically if you never make a wrong turn or stop for a missed sign you would do the entire rally UNDER the speed limit. These are public roads enforced by police, drive accordingly (or dont get caught). 90% of the roads used are backroads in the middle of nowhere and there will be little to no law enforcement but you never know, its your lisence and you're on your own. Your car should be able to handle gravel and dirt roads (splitter 1" off the ground? forget it bring your beater car) but I can do it in my 2" slowered Talon so most cars should be ok.

If you have a CB radio, bring it. Its nice to be able to chat when you come across another car "in the rally". Channel 21.

No, not like gumball. Familys do it with their kids in minivans. If you never get lost (make a wrong turn by missing an instruction) you could do the whole rally under the speed limit and have a perfect score and get 1st place. However every TSD rally is different and the ones WSCC run are very hard. Its almost impossible to not get tricked by the instructions. Everytime you make a wrong turn, you have to speed up to get back on your perfect time. If you get lost twice in the same area, you've really got to haul ass because every second you're late is points. So you can increase your speed a little and still do the speed limit and hope there are no checkpoints soon so you have a long time at the slow speed to get back to your perfect time, or drive like an ass and do it quick in care theres a checkpoint very soon. You can drive any way you want you're on public roads. If a cop pulls you over its your ass and your license. Telling him you're in a rally would be a very bad idea. But WSCC goes out of their way to use all backroads in farm and horse country. Some dirt and gravel. Every now and then you're on a main road where you have to think about cops, but on those backroads you never see cops. The biggest dangers are skidding off the road, oncoming (or any) public traffic, and deer. But like I said you can do the whole thing under the limit in a minivan if you choose. Or you can drive like an idiot to get a really good score. So its not illegal (unless you make it illegal) and its not dangerous (unless you make it dangerous).

Next one is the Thanksgiving rally, so its a long time away.

There are other rally clubs that do rallys in NJ and PA, and they're all different. I did a rally in west NJ on the PA border and it was impossible to get lost. It was just way too easy and very hard to miss a turn. But they had like 15 checkpoint making sure you're not early or late all over the place. So that rally was kinda dull compared to a WSCC rally but it was fun for other reasons. The whole challenge was moderating your speed and being careful about other traffic messing up your perfect time. Everyone finished and the points difference between cars was very small. WSCC rallys only half the cars even finish and the ones that do have huge points differences. Its all about finishing CLOSE to your perfect time, that other rally was all about pacing and getting very few points at each checkpoint and hitting each one less than a minute off.

I see how it works. Sounds pretty cool. Would be interesting to just tear through the rally as fast as possible and see how bad of a score you can get lol. I guess they do that to discourage speeding and stuff like that. I thought I saw something mentioned about signs? You need to write down all of the signs you see or something?

If you come in 15 min early to any checkpoint you get double the points, basically killing any hope of a decent score. Even worse than that they hide signs along the entire route with a symbol on them. The navigator has to keep track of them and write them in order on a score sheet. Every sign you miss, or put them in the wrong order, or put down a sign off course (when they think a lot of people might make the same mistake they throw a sign down there, worth double bad points) you get points. So basically you have your high beams on all the time and you're staring at the side of the road so you dont miss these things. They're hard catch doing a little over the speed limit, but if you're flying you wont see any.

I had two friends do it in an SRT4 last year and they said they were gona do exactly what you said. They came in 12 minutes late (a really bad time anyway), had done TRIPLE the amount of miles they were supposed to (the rally was like 70 miles, they did like 170) and had to drive around looking for a gas station in the middle of the woods. They were doing like 90 on big roads and as fast as possible on backroads. They came in 12 minutes LATE, not early. The faster you go, the more you get lost because you miss instruction clues all over the place. I'm shocked they finished at all. So you could try that and it might be fun to drive fast for a while, but missing every turn instruction and having to backtrack every single instruction would get old pretty quick.